Journeys Home (30 page)

Aside from the usual things, I lived my late teens in the "adversary
culture" of the late 1960s: the Woodstock generation, the protests
against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and the counterculture's
spiritual and moral critiques of the emptiness and inauthenticity
of the established society. Many of my boyhood friends were swept
away by the drugs and music, the philosophy of "free love," absolute
freedom, and self-expression. Thankfully, several close friends
and I recognized that drugs, sex (and more sex), and rock 'n'
roll were not the answer to life's meaning and purpose, and we
resisted the dynamics of this culture.

In my resistance, I began to ask myself: "Does God exist? If He
does, why did He make me?" Not remembering where to turn for answers,
I began searching for direction in my life through the works of
authors popular at the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, and Herman Hesse. It was the summer of 1970.

That summer, I made my first trip to Europe. In Amsterdam, a girl
at a youth hostel told me about L'Abri Fellowship, a community
in Switzerland where young people came from diverse cultures and
religious backgrounds searching for answers to questions about
God, man, and the meaning of life. I don't remember her telling
me that L'Abri was an Evangelical Christian community, only that
staying there was free for the first ten days.

For a guy on a tight budget, therefore, L'Abri sounded like the
place to be. Within a few days, I was off for Huemoz, Switzerland,
a little village about seven miles up into the Swiss Alps near
the city of Montreux, two hours from Geneva.

The first person I met at L'Abri was Os Guinness, whom I later
came to know as a first-rate thinker and a deeply committed Christian.
While he was deciding where I would stay, he gave me a copy of
Francis Schaeffer's classic book,
The God Who Is There.
Schaeffer,
along with his wife, Edith, had founded L'Abri Fellowship in 1955.

You can imagine my surprise -- more exactly, my bewilderment -- when I learned that they had established L'Abri for the purpose
of evangelizing people for Jesus Christ by demonstrating the character
and reality of God by the way the community lived, taught, and
prayed. The singularly unique purpose of this community was to
present the gospel of Jesus Christ as the answer to all life's
basic questions, so that nothing less than God, they claimed,
could completely satisfy my restless quest for truth, for the
good, for happiness.

After ten days at L'Abri, I responded by fleeing -- not just the
place, but more specifically, God. I rationalized leaving by telling
others and myself that Christian faith required a demanding change
of life that wasn't really for me. Thus I left, hitchhiking with
a friend to Rome.

But God would not let me get away that easily. Exhausted from
hitchhiking and running out of money, I found myself a couple
of weeks later unable to get into Spain without a visa. One night
in a French town bordering Spain, I met two American guys. I began
telling them about L'Abri and realized that I was persuading them
to accompany me back. The L'Abri community, with genuine, Christian
charity, welcomed me back with open arms.

From that moment on, I never looked back. I spent the rest of
the summer there, and in time, I returned to Jesus. In faith through
God's grace I accepted the fundamental truth that the ultimate
fulfillment of life to which God calls us is in Jesus Christ -- the love of the Father manifested in the gift of the Son and communicated
by the Holy Spirit.

I now knew that God put me into this world to know, to love, and
to serve Him. I discovered that this truth was not merely a matter
of faith but -- in contrast to those who said that there are no
rational grounds for such believing -- a reasonable assent of
the mind. A Christian commitment involves accepting intellectually
that certain things are true; that faith and reason are not antagonists
but allies; that there are sound arguments for the reasonableness
of the Christian faith. However, this was just the beginning of
my journey home.

In the summer of 1970, I came wholeheartedly to acknowledge, assent
to, and believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord. I responded
in faith, repentance, and obedience to what I would later come
to realize I had received at my infant baptism some twenty years
earlier. At that time, however, I did not see any essential connection
between the Sacrament of Baptism, spiritual rebirth, and salvation.
In fact, Francis Schaeffer insisted that I be baptized again when
I made my public confession of faith before the L'Abri community.

Being a neophyte, I trusted Schaeffer's judgment. He taught that
Baptism as an external rite actually effects nothing and plays
no role in determining our spiritual state before God in Christ.
Years later, when I was more theologically mature, I realized
that Schaeffer, a Presbyterian Calvinist, like the Catholic, the
Eastern Orthodox, the Anglican, and the Lutheran, understood the
rite of Baptism to have some covenantal meaning. Still, he did
not believe what I later came to accept as the truth of Catholic
teaching: that the act of Baptism itself actually effected the
grace of regeneration, washing away the stain of Adam's original
sin that we, as children of Adam, have inherited.

Shortly after returning to the United States, I moved to Chicago
with a good Christian friend I had met at L'Abri. My Christian
experience at L'Abri had given direction to my life in more than
one sense. It was there that I discerned my calling to the academic
life, particularly to studying philosophy and theology. With two
years of college work to finish, however, where was I to go?

Through this concatenation of Christian friends, I enrolled at
Trinity Christian College in suburban Chicago in the fall of 1971.
Once at Trinity, I was introduced to the neo-Calvinist Amsterdam
school of philosophy and theology and began to study the great
theological writings of Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, Herman
Bavinck, and G. C. Berkouwer. I graduated from Trinity in June
1973, having spent my last semester abroad in the Netherlands
participating in a Trinity program at the University of Leiden.

My plan was to do graduate studies at the Free University of Amsterdam,
the bastion of the Amsterdam school of philosophy and theology.
It was the summer of 1973, and I was now a committed Christian
in the Reformed tradition of Dutch neo-Calvinism.

At this point in my journey home, I understood the one Christian
faith to have many interpretations and expressions -- Catholic,
Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Evangelical, and others -- but I had
come to accept the Reformed tradition as the most authentic interpretation
of the Christian faith. Central in this tradition were the writings
of the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509 - 1564) and Abraham
Kuyper (1837 - 1920), theologian, politician, and founder of
the Free University of Amsterdam.

This tradition's unique understanding of the biblical themes of
creation, fall, and redemption built upon the intellectual formation
I had received at L'Abri. The world, including man and his works,
is an actual manifestation and exercise of God's goodness and
gift of creation. At the same time, there are also fallenness,
evil, destructive powers, idols, and, yes, sin, as violation of
the will and purpose of God.

The whole of creation is fallen. Thanks be to God, however, His
work of redemption was cosmic in scope, restoring life in its
fullness and delivering the whole creation, including man and
all his works -- not the least of which is the life of the mind -- from sin.

Furthermore, God has called us in Christ to be His coworkers by
cooperating in His mission for renewal, for realizing His Kingdom,
for making the world holy. In the phrase of Nicholas Wolterstorff,
"Neo-Calvinism is a world-formative Christianity, a tradition
of holy worldliness."

After eight years of being steeped in the Amsterdam school of
philosophy and theology, I received my Ph. D. in September 1981.
Still, I was restless. The liturgical life of the church in the
Reformed tradition was deeply unsatisfying.

My studies of the history of the Catholic Church led me to discover
that the Church had an ancient liturgy that was rooted in her
sacramental life, a life that was wholly biblical and evangelical,
that is, flowing directly from the gospel of Jesus Christ. I became
convinced that the Reformed tradition wrongly rejected the Catholic
Church's teaching about the sacraments, the liturgy -- especially
the sacrifice of the Mass -- and her piety as it was chiefly expressed
in the Council of Trent. This was a first but nonetheless decisive
break for me with some aspects of the Reformed tradition.

Over the next eight years, I examined and found wanting other
aspects of classical Reformed Protestant teaching, particularly
the doctrines of
sola fide
and
sola scriptura.
Through the writings
of great men of faith such as Thomas Aquinas, Blessed John Henry
Newman, and Blessed Pope John Paul II, I moved away from the Reformed
tradition and became an Anglo-Catholic.

By fall 1991, I had held teaching posts in South Africa, the United
States, and Canada, and by the next spring, everything in my mind
and heart was converging on Rome. I was ready to heed Christ's
call to embrace His Body, the Catholic Church, as the one true
fold: I wanted her antiquity; her unity; her orthodoxy; her Magisterium,
or teaching authority, manifested in all teachings about faith
and morals, that Christ had founded in Peter and his apostolic
successors; her episcopal hierarchy; and her mission to teach
all nations and to preach the gospel to every creature so that
all may attain salvation, faith, Baptism, and the fulfillment
of the commandments.

All this I now accepted as wholly evangelical. As I put it to
my last Anglican pastor, everything that drew me to the Anglo-Catholic
tradition was Catholic in origin, and the Holy Spirit was now
guiding me to accept the fullness of truth in the Catholic Church.
To quote the title of Scott and Kimberly Hahn's popular book,
I was headed to "Rome sweet home."

The Apostle Paul had written to Timothy that "the Church of the
living God" was "the pillar and ground of the Truth" (1 Tm 3:15).
For twenty-two years of Christian searching, I had been trying
to discover the truth about this Church revealed by God in His
written Word. It was only later that I discovered a prayer of
the Church that, using different words, accurately expressed my
longing to come to a fuller knowledge of God in Christ. I record
now in this chronicle the prayer for others who are searching
for the truth about Christ's Church: Lord God, since by the adoption
of grace, You have made us children of light: do not let false
doctrine darken our minds, but grant that Your light may shine
within us and we may always live in the brightness of truth.

I knew that the Christian life could only be grounded in authentic
Christian doctrine, that is, in truth. St. Augustine, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Blessed John Newman, and Blessed John Paul II had taught
me this, and early on in my Christian experience, Francis Schaeffer
had done so as well. Thus, I could not accept, any more than Newman,
the doctrine he called religious liberalism, namely, "that truth
and falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one
doctrine is as good as another; that the Governor of the world
does not intend that we should gain the truth; that there is no
truth; that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess."

These claims, as Newman saw, were incompatible with any recognition
of the Christian faith as true.

In this light, I understood my conversion to be both a personal
commitment and a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed
about His Church. Significantly, this conversion was my response
in faith and obedience to Christ's high-priestly prayer to the
Father: "That they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in
me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world
may believe that you have sent me" (Jn 17:21).

The interpersonal communion of Persons that characterizes the
love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the ultimate
source of the Church's unity. So I now knew in truth that if I
were to enter more deeply into the life of God, I must enter into
fuller communion with the Church of Christ.

The ecclesiology of Vatican II is that the "Church [of Jesus Christ],
constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists
in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of
Peter and by the bishops in union with that successor" (
Lumen
Gentium,
8). The Catholic Church in a unique way is the fully
and rightly ordered expression of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Vatican II also taught that all Christians, all those who are
"in Christ," are truly, genuinely, but imperfectly, in communion
with the Catholic Church. "[I]n some real way they are joined
with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them also He gives His gifts
and graces, and is thereby operative among them with His sanctifying
power" (
Lumen Gentium,
15).

This very important teaching helped me to make sense of the "many
elements of sanctification and of truth" that I found throughout
my Christian experience -- from L'Abri to the Reformed and Anglo-Catholic
traditions of Protestant Christianity. Indeed, I now knew them
to be gifts and graces that the Spirit of Christ used as instruments
to bring me home.

At the same time, the teaching of Vatican II, recently reiterated
in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church,
"does not treat these
[elements of sanctification and of truth] as autonomous and free-floating,"
as Dominican Father Aidan Nichols puts it. "Rather do they derive
from the fullness of gracious truth Christ has given His holy
Catholic Church, and coming from that source, carry a built-in
gravitational pull back -- or on! -- towards the Church's unity."